A Brainy Family

“It’s that way isn’t it?”

“No if the Samfundet is that way, it must be in this direction.”

We follow a long line of cars on the way of town. Homewards. It’s Friday afternoon, and the start of the weekend. Skavlan and the rest of the Friday night lineup will be on in a few hours.

We decide on taking a right.

“This must be the way.”

We have a rendez-vous with two of the world’s leading brain researchers. Digernes, NTNU’s director, calls them international stars within their field. They’re researching sense of direction.

Recognized

Edvard and May-Britt Moser are director and deputy director of the Center for Memory Biology, respectively. They have received several prizes for their work. Last year, they received the prestigious Louis Jantet Prize, winning 4.2 million in research funds. Their big breakthrough came in 2005, when they managed to prove the existence of so-called grid cells in the entorhinal cortex. They function as a coordinate system which registers our movements, and are closely related to memory.

May-Britt offers us coffee in the research center’s little kitchen, which is surprisingly crowded considering the hour of the day and the day of the week. The youngest person present is the newborn daughter of two of the researchers at the center. She plays a little with the baby, before her long legs, standing on high wedge heels, carry her down to the end of the hall.

“This is my office. Take a seat while I go get Edvard.”

He walks in with decided steps, jeans and a light purple knitted sweater. He nods and we shake hands.

Blind Man’s Bluff

Letting these two researchers answer questions about “what they’re up to right now” requires a certain amount of patience. They talk uninterrupted for almost twenty minutes. They explain how grid cells create a network in the brain, a kind of map over the environment a person is in. They also tell us about how all mammals are so similar that by understanding how a rat’s brain functions, one can also understand the human brain.

“Let’s say for example that the rat is walking on this table here and in those places where the cells are active, meaning the cells send an electric signal, a special pattern is created that looks like graph paper. Look here.”

He points to something which, if I didn’t know better, looks like a doodle interspersed with big, black flecks.

“Here we’ve measured a rat which has walked around a can looking for chocolate crumbs. The black lines are where the rat has gone, and the dots are the places where the cell has been electrically active.”

“But what can this actually be used for?”

“Good question. We use it, for example, to make our way around a room. Let’s say that you’re walking blindfolded. You start in a corner, and even though you can’t see, you have a feeling of how long and in which direction you’ve walked,” says May-Britt.

She sits, leaning over the round table and gesticulates with her arms in the air.

“It’s pretty much our sense of direction?”

“Yes!”

“Well, you can say that it’s the quantitative part of the sense of direction,” adds Edvard.

He is leaning back, calm, with his arms in folded.

Understanding the brain

The goal behind the couple’s research is more than a little ambitious. They believe that there is a cure for Alzheimers within their reach. This sickness develops in the part of the brain called the entorhial cortex, where the grid cells can be found, and spreads further to the hippocampus, which controls memory.

“If we understand these parts of the brain, what they consist of and how they work, it would be possible to go in and prevent Alzheimers,” confirms Edvard.

This is impressive in and of itself, but it isn’t everything.

“In addition, there’s a long term perspective. By understanding which codes the brain uses, we can in principle understand all diseases. The brain is so uninventive that it uses the same principles again and again. So it’s not just Alzheimer’s, but all neurological psychiatric diseases,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s not just diseases. We want to understand how the brain works generally,” says May-Britt.

“Are you saying it’s possible to understand the entire brain?”

“Yes, that’s our motivation. It’s fun to understand the sense of direction, but the big question is: how does the brain work?”

Ok, nothing less than that.

Animal dilemma

The research work is not without its problems. For the first time during the interview they start interrupting each other.

“Working with animals is a dilemma. Even though we treat the animals as well as we can, they’re not free,” says May-Britt.

Curiosity is motivation enough, but since they’re working with animals, the work must be justified in its applicability to humans, they explain.

“I’ll be honest. I think it’s terribly difficult to justify that we work with animals. I have to have that discussion with myself every day, if I really think it’s worth it.”

May-Britt hardly takes time to breath when she talks. Edvard also leans forwards places his hands on the table.

“The animals are treated well, but of course it’s something that we have to focus on. We always work to improve the rats’ quality of life,” he says.

Of course, being a rat with a home address in the fourth floor of the Center for Memory Biology doesn’t seem all that bad. In the lab jazz music streams out of the Dab radio.

“I had originally put on a CD with Jan Garbarek, but the other people working here thought that was a little much.”

May-Britt bends over and opens one of the cages.

“Want to come out? Come and say hello. Do you want a choco-loop?”

Weetos choco-loops, an important tool for anyone handling rats. This rat has a sensor implanted in his brain. May-Britt can’t say it enough:

“These implants don’t hurt them. They don’t notice anything. And look, they’re relaxed and calm just like regular rats. If they didn’t like it, they would just sit in a corner and refuse to cooperate.”

Camera shy

Back in the office, it’s getting late. There’s probably lots of activity in Skavlan’s the “green room” now. The Mosers were on the talk show themselves last year, but this wasn’t at the top of Edvard’s wish list.

“No, I didn’t really want to do it. They had tried to get us on the show for several years, but now our board of directors made it clear that we had to do it.”

“Really?”

“When they called me I had no idea who Skavlan was, so I told them that I didn’t have time. I don’t watch TV very much.”

He laughs.

“What’s funny about that?”

May-Britt answers.

“I thought it was really fun! But of course you have to take it for what it is. You’re not there to hold a lecture, but to say that ‘science’ is also something that people can discuss on a Friday evening. And it’s also important that we do these kinds of things. It’s important to make what we do visible. We have to pay back for a little of what we’ve gotten.”

Outside the box

The Mosers don’t seem to be in a rush to get home. They’ve started talking about another cause that is close to their hearts. This is about choice of studies. They’re upset over the criticism for students who switch their degree program before they’ve finished.

“It takes time to find out what you want to do. You don’t really know what you’re getting into until you’ve actually tried it. I think it’s sensible to try something else if you find out that you’re on the wrong track,” he says.

May-Britt agrees.

“Yes, that’s much better than continuing. Hearing about people who are working with something that they don’t like makes my hair stand on end. What counts most is doing something fun.”

They strongly believe that the reason for their success lies in the fact that they’ve always worked with something they thought was fun, and that they’re dared to cross academic borders and think in a new way.

“I’ve had a lot of use for the math and statistics that I studied in addition to psychology. Connecting different fields in new ways, and becoming something different than what everyone else is has been valuable for us.”

Their clear advice is not too blindly trust your student advisor and premade course plans.

“Dare to think untraditionally.”

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree

The conversation rolls to a stop, and I have a chance to look at my notes for the first time.

“Yes, it was those personal questions that you mentioned,” he says.

“No, don’t remind her of that!”

The Mosers like to talk about their research, but they claim that they don’t discuss grid cells at home at the dinner table. However, their eldest daughter, Isabel (20) studies biology at NTNU.

“We’ve been clear about the fact that the children will be allowed to choose their education themselves, so Isabel choosing to study biology has been something that she came up with on her own,” he says.

It appears that is a slightly modified truth. Isabel explains that she has accompanied her mother to work since she was four years old.

“It can be said that my sister and I grew up in the lab,” she says.

Mama Moser admits that her children were not unexposed to the world of science.

“When they were small, there wasn’t anyone who could look after them, so they came with us to quite a few conferences. So, yeah. They’ve met a few Nobel prize winners here and there.”

Still, being a “daughter of the Mosers” isn’t the easiest thing.

“I definitely feel pressure, and I often hear that I need to ‘spread the Moser genes.’ But of course, more than anything I’m proud. Sometimes I get an urge to raise my hand in class and yell, ‘my parents found that out!’”

Both sides of the brain

“People always talk about you two as a couple. Are you as alike as people say you are?”

They answer immediately.

“We’re extremely different, but we fill each out.”

She laughs out loud.

“In what way are you different?”

“I mean haven’t you noticed?”

The differences are hard not to notice. Their daughter describes it in the following way:

“Mom is open and outgoing. Dad has a more professional attitude. In other words, you go to Mom when you’ve broken up with your boyfriend. You go to Dad when you have the world’s most difficult math problem in your homework.”

Outside, the Friday evening traffic has dissipated. The people of Trondheim are home from work, two days off.

“We should leave now before the store closes, May-Britt.”

“Yeah, we’ll probably want some food this weekend.”

They can still make Skavlan.